My site penalized after 301 Redirect or redesign?
-
Hi,
I have a question regarding my site (http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com) that has, all of a sudden, lost rankings on several keywords; plus, Google Analytics and the plug-in Clicky installed on my site (the site is built on WordPress) claim that my site has no visitors/visits anymore.
I would like to provide a little background of what has happened. Three weeks ago I asked my web hosting company to do a 301 redirect from http://pokeronlineitalia.com to http://www.pokeronlineitalia.com. At the same time I asked a web hosting company to to a redesign of the site. Strangely, the day after the new redesigned site went online Google Analytics and the Clicky plug-in showed that my site, from one day to the other, had no visitors/visits anymore (I had installed Google Analytics and Clicky before the 301 redirect). In addition, I noticed that I had lost positions on many keywords for which I used to rank on the second page.
However, the PR of the site has remained intact and Google is indexing it without problems. Plus, I still rank high for a keyword. I tend to believe that because of this, my site was not penalized by mighty Google...but I'd like an SEO expert to tell me what he thinks about it. In particular, please answer this: has my site lost rankings because of the 301 redirect? Has my site been penalized because of the redesign? Is this only a temporary situation?
Thank you very much for your help.
- Sal
-
salvyy
My suggestion, given your location is to first look at those on SEOmoz who are available in Europe or Italy. As to cost, I am not sure what they charge there. I do know there are some brilliant SEO people in Europe and Italy. (Yes, I know Italy is in Europe and am making a distinction ) If you choose a company from the US, I would look for someone on SEOmoz as well.
I would suggest finding at least three no matter where they are from, PM them, and give them all the same list of what you need. Then, ask each to provide a proposal and quote. You choose based on what you come up with that best fits your needs.
Best
-
Hi JourneyMan,
Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. No, apparently the web designer did not include the GA code in all the pages. I'll ask the web hosting company to put it back ASAP.
You say that my site has a lot of SEO related issues. I wish I knew what you are talking about. I'll try to find a reliable/trustworthy company that can work on the site and solve the issues you are referring to. Hopefully, she will not forget about the GA code...:-)
Thank you and have a great day.
- Sal
-
Hi Robert,
Thank you so much for your feedback. I am learning so much from people like you!
The problem with me is that I study a lot of SEO but I am really bad at taking care of the technical issues (coding, web design, etc...). I have to ask other people to do it for me. As you know, sometimes you hire people who do not care about your site and problems emerge. I would have never found out about the fact that the web designer forgot to include the GA code in the site, for instance.
Thank you for your recommendations on how to make the site more SEO-friendly. I'll follow them. Finally, I'd like to know if it is possibile to find a reliable (and not too expensive :-)) company I can hire to do just that: analyze my site and get rid of all the those technical problems (bad coding, missing WordPress plug-ins that are good for SEO, et similia) that I cannot detect, as I am incredibly ignorant in this field. I feel that it's the technical issues that prevent my sites from performing a little better.
Thank you again and all the best to you!
- Sal
P.S.: I love and miss the wise US sayings
-
Sal, Eyepaq is correct. It does appear that the redirect worked and was likely done correctly. I would also suggest setting the www. subdomain of the site as the preferred in GWMT.
I have to say this as well, to quote the kind eyepaq, "You do have a lot of SEO related issues...."
I always wonder with poker sites, betting sites, vitamin, etc. that the questions are "I did something correct, did I get penalized." One thing that I have learned through the Q&A is that Google is not nearly as strict with some of these issues as one might think. If they were, I am a bit unsure how some sites would rank on page 100.
Here is something to consider: What if you reduced the number of links on the page to your best 10 or 20? What if you had a poker site that did not try to capitalize on every affiliate offer on the planet and instead focused on providing the best clients to the top 10 or 20 sites and that provided content so compelling that novice or pro would want to read it.
There is a saying regarding real estate often heard hear in the US: You want to be the cheapest or most expensive house in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, with so many gambling sites, it is all about being like the rest of them. If you want to truly succeed, find a way to differentiate yourself from the pack.
Good luck. Good move on the 301.
-
Your site is still in the index, ranking for several terms - so no heavy penalization in place.
You do have a lot of SEO related issues on the site that can and will harm you in the future but it doesn't look it's that heavy to go from x to 0.
Did you check if with the new redesign has all things in place ?
The team that did the redesign didn't place / implemented the Google Analytic code in the new design.
I don't see it in your source code in any of the pages I've checked.
It must look something link this in the head section of the source code.
var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-xxxxxxxx-1']); _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.yoursite.com']); _gaq.push(['_setAllowLinker', true]); _gaq.push(['_setAllowAnchor', true]); _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar', 5,'User-Type','free', 2]); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
**Ask your developers to put the code back on ever page and **
**everything will go back.**
**Redesign can cause some issues so is the 301 redirect but in **
**this case it's not the issue !**
Hope it helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is domain authority lost if you create a 301 redirect but mark it as noindex, nofollow?
Hi everyone, Our company sells products in various divisions. While we've been selling Product A and Product B under our original brand, we've recently created a new division with a new domain to focus on a Product B. The new domain has virtually no domain authority (3) while the original domain has some (37). We want customers to arrive on the new domain when they search for key search terms related to Product B instead of the pages that previously existed on our main website. If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags? I read a few blog posts from Moz that said there isn't any domain authority lost with 301 redirects but I'm not sure if that is true if the pages are noindex, nonofollow. Do you follow? 🙂 Apologies for the lengthy post. Love this community and the great Moz team. Thanks, Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jgoehring-troy0 -
Do bulk 301 redirects hurt seo value?
We are working with a content based startup that needs to 301 redirect a lot of its pages to other websites. Will give you an example to help you understand. If we assume this is the startups domain and URL structure www.ourcompany.com/brand1/article What they want to do is do a 301 redirect of www.ourcompany.com/brand1/ to www.brand1.com I have never seen 301 as a problem to SEO or link juice. But in this case where all the major URLs are getting redirected to other sites i was wondering if it would have a negative effect. Right now they have just 20-30 brands but they are planning to hit a couple of hundreds this year.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aaronfernandez0 -
Splitting and moving site to two domains - How to redirect
I have a client who is going to split their retail and wholesale business and rebrand the retail biz. So let’s say they are going to move everything from currentdomain.com to either retaildomain.com or wholesaledomain.com. The most important business for them is the retail site, so they want to pass on as much ranking power as they can from currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com. I see two choices here: We can 301 redirect all of currentdomain.com to retaildomain.com, and then redirect any wholesale pages to wholesaledomain.com. The advantage is that we can use GSC’s change of address tool to report the change to Google. The downside is that there is a redirect chain (2 hops) to wholesaledomain.com. Would this confuse Google? Or we can 301 redirect page by page from currentdomain.com to the appropriate page on either new site. This means no redirect chains but it also means that we can’t use GSC’s change of address tool. Which would you do and why? And is there another option that I'm missing? I appreciate any insights you can share.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rich.owings1 -
Site redesign..have I done everything?
Hello, We have a site that was recently put through the redesign process-a couple of weeks ago. It was a tired site that was optimized well, but still struggled because it was so outdated. I went ahead and re-optimized, submitted a new sitemap, and did the fetch. Have I missed a step? Could someone offer insight into what they do when a site is redesigned and the steps taken to make sure that Google crawls and "appreciates" 🙂 the new site as soon as possible? Thanks in advance for any and all help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lfrazer0 -
How do I best handle Duplicate Content on an IIS site using 301 redirects?
The crawl report for a site indicates the existence of both www and non-www content, which I am aware is duplicate. However, only the www pages are indexed**, which is throwing me off. There are not any 'no-index' tags on the non-www pages and nothing in robots.txt and I can't find a sitemap. I believe a 301 redirect from the non-www pages is what is in order. Is this accurate? I believe the site is built using asp.net on IIS as the pages end in .asp. (not very familiar to me) There are multiple versions of the homepage, including 'index.html' and 'default.asp.' Meta refresh tags are being used to point to 'default.asp'. What has been done: 1. I set the preferred domain to 'www' in Google's Webmaster Tools, as most links already point to www. 2. The Wordpress blog which sits in a /blog subdirectory has been set with rel="canonical" to point to the www version. What I have asked the programmer to do: 1. Add 301 redirects from the non-www pages to the www pages. 2. Set all versions of the homepage to redirect to www.site.org using 301 redirects as opposed to meta refresh tags. Have all bases been covered correctly? One more concern: I notice the canonical tags in the source code of the blog use a trailing slash - will this create a problem of inconsistency? (And why is rel="canonical" the standard for Wordpress SEO plugins while 301 redirects are preferred for SEO?) Thanks a million! **To clarify regarding the indexation of non-www pages: A search for 'site:site.org -inurl:www' returns only 7 pages without www which are all blog pages without content (Code 200, not 404 - maybe deleted or moved - which is perhaps another 301 redirect issue).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kimmiedawn0 -
.htaccess 301 Redirect Help! Specific Redirects and Blanket Rule
Hi there, I have the following domains: OLD DOMAIN: domain1.co.uk NEW DOMAIN: domain2.co.uk I need to create a .htaccess file that 301 redirects specific, individual pages on domain1.co.uk to domain2.co.uk I've searched for hours to try and find a solution, but I can't find anything that will do what I need. The pages on domain1.co.uk are all kinds of filenames and extensions, but they will be redirected to a Wordpress website that has a clean folder structure. Some example URL's to be redirected from the old website: http://www.domain1.co.uk/charitypage.php?charity=357 http://www.domain1.co.uk/adopt.php http://www.domain1.co.uk/register/?type=2 These will need to be redirected to the following URL types on the new domain: http://www.domain2.co.uk/charities/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/adopt/ http://www.domain2.co.uk/register/ I would also like a blanket/catch-all redirect from anything else on www.domain1.co.uk to the homepage of www.domain2.co.uk if there isn't a specific individual redirect in place. I'm literally tearing my hair out with this, so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Townpages0 -
301 redirect recommendations
One of our clients we are working on have two sites the main with a PR5 and a separate one with a PR4. We are planning on doing a 301 from the PR4 to a page on the PR5 Is it best to do: www.PR4.com ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page or www.PR4.com/page ----> www.PR5.com/releveantPR4page Most pages on the PR4 site can fit into one PR5 page logically. However the PR4 has an about us, contact us, blog/with posts, FAQ, Applications, Legal Resources which are all pretty out dated.. The PR4 site is kinda messy and we are not sure if it will be easy to 301 each page individually with the user in mind. can we do a sitewide 301 redirect from the root PR4.com to a page PR/5.com/releveantPR4page and also do deeper 301's? PR4.com/PR4page ---> PR5.com/releveantPR4page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bryan_Loconto0 -
How to decide on which site to 301 redirect
Hi there I'd like your opinions please! My client currently has their website at not-very-good-url.it which has a really good link profile they also have duplicate sites at: much-better-brand-name-url.it and much-better-brand-name-url.com but both these other sites have only a handful of links in. How important do you think a better brand url is? And therefore do you think it would be better to 301 to a better brand URL and take the risk that the link profile will get hit? Or leave the main site where it is and 301 the other two to it? Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0